Kenya: Drought worsens, with no end in sight

A Turkana woman carries dried skinned from goats she has lost to a biting drought that has ravaged livestock population in nothern Kenya near Lokitaung in Turkana county . (TONY KARUMBA / AFP)

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A young girl passes up a jerrycan filled with murky water trickling into a waterhole from underground rocks near Lokitaung. (TONY KARUMBA / AFP)

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In just a few years water, oil and money would flow. Roads, schools and hospitals would follow. Turkana's generations of poverty and neglect in Kenya's arid north would end. But it was not to be: five years after the discovery of oil, and four since a giant aquifer was found, drought has struck again, shattering the dreams of a different future for Turkana, a bone dry region of dust and stone, home to mostly semi-nomadic livestock herders and lacking the most basic trappings of modernity. (TONY KARUMBA / AFP)

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Five years after the discovery of oil, and four since a giant aquifer was found, drought has struck again, shattering the dreams of a different future for Turkana, a bone dry region of dust and stone. (TONY KARUMBA / AFP)

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Turkana woman hold and launch dead animals they lost due to a biting drought that has ravaged livestock population in nothern Kenya . (TONY KARUMBA / AFP)

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A Turkana woman carries firewood. Kenya has declared this year’s drought a ‘national disaster’ and appealed for international aid. (TONY KARUMBA / AFP)

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A young boy waits by the mouth of a rapidly drying waterhole near Lokitaung in northern Kenya’s Turkana county where a biting drought has ravaged livestock population . (TONY KARUMBA / AFP)

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Turkana women carry dead animals they lost due to a biting drought that has ravaged livestock population in nothern Kenya near Lokitaung in Turkana. (TONY KARUMBA / AFP)

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A dead animals lies in the sun near Lokitaung in northern Kenya’s Turkana county where a biting drought has ravaged livestock population. (TONY KARUMBA / AFP)

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A Turkana woman lays out hides skinned from animals she lost due to a biting drought. (TONY KARUMBA / AFP)

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As the drought bites, the road ahead looks longer than ever for Turkana: some 92 percent of its 1.4 million people live below the poverty line and only a fifth know how to read and write, a figure four times lower than the national average. Three million people are in need of emergency humanitarian assistance, and, while the response has been more effective than the last time, in 2011, still more needs to be done, aid workers say. (TONY KARUMBA / AFP)